In a survey published in March 2025, the Foundation for Future Studies asked 3,000 Germans how they book their holidays. Eleven percent said they decide spontaneously and book at the last minute. Nearly nine in ten decide against a spontaneous booking. Among young adults, 19 percent book spontaneously. Among families, 9 percent do. The foundation explained that outside young adulthood, people rely on Planungssicherheit, the security of a plan. In 2020, in a survey by the same foundation, 77 percent said they would like to do spontaneously whatever they feel like doing.
psychology
Settling In at Daycare
When a small child starts at a German daycare center, the first weeks follow a plan called the Eingewöhnung, the settling-in. The best-known model is the Berlin model, named after Hans-Joachim Laewen, Beate Andres and Eva Hédervári-Heller. It begins with a basic phase of about three days. The child spends one or two hours a day in the group, and the parent stays in the room, passive but attentive to the child. The first short separation comes only on the fourth or fifth day. If the child protests, the parent comes back after a few minutes. The separations then grow longer step by step. The settling-in is complete when the child accepts the teacher as a sichere Basis, a secure base. The city of Bielefeld tells parents to plan mindestens 2 – 4 Wochen, at least two to four weeks. Its leaflet adds: Ihr Kind bestimmt das Tempo! (Your child sets the pace!)
Before the Settling-In
Until the late 1980s, and often well into the 2000s, it was common for small children in Germany to be handed over to daycare without any settling-in period. Research at the Free University of Berlin in 1984 and 1985, by Kuno Beller’s team, which included Hans-Joachim Laewen, found that children who started this way were absent through illness three to four times as often in their first six to seven months. They also showed delays in development and a less secure attachment to their mothers. In 2007, Laewen, Beate Andres and Eva Hédervári spoke of einem gravierenden Verstoß gegen das Kindeswohl, a serious violation of the child’s welfare, when children under three were not settled in. Today the term Eingewöhnung is fixed in the education plans of the German states.
The Rubicon Model
The psychologists Heinz Heckhausen and Peter M. Gollwitzer described action in four phases. Their model is named after the river Caesar crossed. In the first phase, a person weighs the options. Then the person decides and crosses the Rubicon. The second phase is planning: In der Planungsphase bereitet sich die Person auf das Handeln vor. (In the planning phase, the person prepares to act.) The question is no longer what to achieve, but how. Only the third phase is action. The fourth is evaluation.
Best If Not Much Changes
In early 2018, the Allensbach Institute asked people in the state of Hesse whether they agreed with this statement: Alles in allem geht es Hessen doch gut. Es wäre daher das Beste, wenn sich nicht viel ändern würde. (All in all, Hesse is doing well. So it would be best if not much changed.) Fifty-seven percent agreed. Across Germany, the share of people who said they believed in progress fell from 56 percent in 1967 to 32 percent in April 2019.
Four sides of a message
In 1981, Friedemann Schulz von Thun published the first volume of Miteinander reden, Talking with each other. In it he described four sides of every message: the factual content, what the speakers reveal about themselves, the relationship, and the appeal. In the model, disturbances and conflicts arise when sender and receiver read and weigh the four sides differently.
By this model, a comment on a report also carries a message about the relationship with the person who wrote it.
Punish Transgressions, Not Errors
Michael Frese, a business psychologist at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, puts the rule this way: Fehler sollte man nicht bestrafen, Übertretungen hingegen schon. Mistakes should not be punished, but transgressions should. In a study published in 2005 with three colleagues, he found that a culture of managing errors was linked to better company performance. The finding held in a second study, using data on changes in profitability from 47 German organizations. A 2018 article in the Austrian newspaper Die Presse sums up the research on error culture in one sentence: Theorie und Praxis liegen weit auseinander. Theory and practice lie far apart.
Groupthink
Irving Janis coined the term in 1972, studying American foreign policy disasters including the Bay of Pigs. His argument was that cohesive groups suppress dissent in order to preserve agreement, and the suppression is usually invisible to everyone in the room.
An American psychologist named the failure mode in which a team stops exchanging information while believing it still is.
Learned optimism
Martin Seligman spent his early career on learned helplessness: after repeated uncontrollable adversity, people stop trying even when they could succeed. It became a leading model for depression.
Then he inverted it. If helplessness can be learned, so can optimism. He identified explanatory style as the mechanism — pessimists attribute bad events to causes that are internal, stable and global, and those attributions can be disputed and changed.
Elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 by the widest margin in its history, he used the position to launch positive psychology as a field. An American psychologist turned optimism into a research discipline and then into a training programme.
Grit
Angela Duckworth’s research argues that sustained effort over long periods predicts achievement better than talent does, and her book on it was a substantial American bestseller.
The finding is congenial, and that is part of why it travelled. It says the thing did not work yet, rather than that it will not work.